motivational analysis of organizations

to see what your organization’s top competitors or peer organizations are doing as they
prepare to meet the challenges of the 21st Century. You also should consider the longterm
needs of your organization: How will your employer become steadily more
competitive while utilizing fewer resources and responding to growing customer
demands for higher levels of product and service quality? Armed with responses to
questions such as these, you are then ready to examine the degree to which your current
leadership or management style will help you and your employer to be successful in the
coming period.
0-59 = You have little or no awareness of 21st Century management practices. For
a variety of reasons, you also may have little or no interest in altering that situation.
Your main tasks for the future include taking time to reflect on where you want your
career to lead, your effectiveness in working with other people, how you feel about
yourself as a leader/manager, and how other people with whom you work seem to react
to your present style of leadership or management.
Background to Part One
Kotter (1982) identifies specific activities or characteristics involved with each of the
three common, overarching tasks of managers. These include:
1. Developing an agenda. This allows managers to react in an opportunistic
manner, knowing that their actions will serve broader, long-term goals. It is
important to note that agendas are not the same as formal plans. Agendas consist
of loosely connected goals and plans. Compared to formal plans, the (usually
unwritten) agendas contain less-detailed financial objectives, more-detailed
strategies, and a broader time frame, and they articulate multiple and somewhat
vague goals that will be accomplished simultaneously through an incremental
process. Developed largely inside managers’ minds, agendas address short-term
(one year), medium-term (one-to-five years), and long-term (five-to-twenty
years) goals. In order to gather the information needed to help them tighten their
agendas, managers must be aggressive information seekers and must rely on
conversations with others for information—not on books, magazines, studies, or
reports.
2. Building a network to execute the agenda. Modern managers go outside their
formal structures and build cooperative relationships with people (peers, boss,
outsiders, vendors, boss’s boss, subordinates’ subordinates, etc.). Agendabuilding
managers also foster very strong ties to and among their subordinates;
they do favors for others, encourage people to identify with them, consciously
develop feelings of dependence in those around them, change suppliers, lobby,
set norms, move/hire/fire subordinates, and actively shape their environments.
Their tactical goals include encouraging others to feel obliged and dependent,
enhancing their reputations in others’ eyes, replacing incompetent employees,
and maximizing teamwork while minimizing politics. The bottom line is that a
The Pfeiffer Library Volume 19, 2nd Edition. Copyright © 1998 Jossey-Bass/Pfeiffer ❚❘ 205